


To Be Alone

by smolhombre



Series: Crackship Armadas [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Ultimate Universe
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, First Times, Flawed Characters Trying Their Best, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Getting to Know Each Other, Graphic Depictions of Feelings, Grumpy Grandpa Jokes, Loose and free with canon timelines, M/M, Patience and Understanding, Slow Burn, Snark, Thats my kink, The Avengers Are Good Bros, Women Being Awesome, becoming friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 19:13:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11088138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: You shouldn’t meet your heroes, but you also shouldn’t leave your heroes after a miserable five mile run in sullen, reluctant companionship and a silent non-goodbye.





	To Be Alone

Kate meets Steve Rogers one hundred percent on purpose.

Kate _sleeps_ with Steve Rogers one hundred percent on accident.

She studies the broad panes of his back beside her, still glistening with sweat, like she’s trying to prove herself wrong. He’s turned away from her as he fiddles with his phone, grumbling. He does that a lot, Kate knows that now. Knows like how she knows he can’t sleep without the TV on, knows how he never got a driver's license and doesn’t believe in using his turn signals, knows how he likes to be touched.

His muscles ripple like a smooth tide under his warm skin with his inhales and exhales, and his starchy white sheets smell like crisp bleach and the Guerlain Vetiver she sees in its vintage bottle on his nightstand. Her thighs slick together when she shifts, and she’s sore from the inside out as she flops back to the pillows, grinning.

Ninety-nine percent on accident.

 

 

*

“Hawkeye.”

Kate looks up, still suctioned to her coffee.

“Hawkeye,” she sighs, after a too big sip that scalds the pink pulp of her throat. “What part of ‘I will beat the shit out of you if you don’t rest’ did you not hear?”

Clint looks like hell, but he smirks at her and she’s rolling her eyes before he even says it, gesturing to his ears and showing off the absence of his hearing aids.

“You mock a deaf man? In his own home?”

“You know, you might not be able to hear it, but after a certain point, you tell a joke so many times people stop laughing.”

For all of his bravado, he can’t seem to avoid whimpering as he sits next to her on his shitty couch, prying the coffee from her hands.

“I couldn’t sleep, Katie-Kate. Tone down the death glare.”

Kate frowns and waits until he’s finished downing half of her drink before speaking so that he can lip read and have no excuse to ignore her.

“You were gone for ten minutes. You didn’t even try.”

“Why are you still here, Hawkeye?”

“I’m trying to keep you from killing yourself,” she huffs, crossing her arms. “You’re under house arrest. Enforced by me.”

“I broke a few ribs and cracked my noggin. I’ve been beat up worse.”

Kate bites the inside of her cheek.

“It’s almost as if,” Clint says slowly, raising the cup back up to his mouth and blowing nonexistent steam from it just for show, because he is an _asshole_ , “you’re looking for a reason to hang around.”

“Your apartment smells like dirty socks and questionable women, many of whom I know you find on Craigslist, you garbage fire of a human being. Your company is hardly stellar, either. I’m just a slave to my compassionate nature.”

“I saw you going through my phone earlier.”

“I always go through your phone, Hawkeye.”

“You don’t always see messages from Captain America on there.”

Kate sits back and places her feet on Clint’s lap, crossing her ankles. She waves one hand in the air breezily as she responds, deftly dodging his implication.

“Can you blame the man for not texting you much? You’re a shithead. He’s been through enough in his life.”

“Kate.”

“Clint.”

He grabs at her instep and squeezes. He’s grinning and it scrunches up one of the greenish bruises at his temple. One side of his face is so swollen that half of his mouth hardly lifts at all. She kicks at him when she starts feeling too fond.

“I know he’s your favorite.”

“Dr. Banner is my favorite. That last tiff with AIM he mistook you for one of the minions and swung you around by your ankle for a while, I saw it all immortalized on the television. You know they broadcast CNN in Cabo?”

“He didn’t mistake me for anyone, he was mad I spilled coffee all over his work that morning.”

“Another reason why he is my favorite.”

Clint presses his thumb into the arch of her foot nearly to the point of pain.

“Of course, even if Steve isn’t my favorite, I am curious why he would come by. That’s just natural. I haven’t met him yet but he doesn’t seem to make many social calls.”

“You haven’t met Tony yet either, but I don’t think you’d hang around after finding a text from him on my phone.”

“That didn’t answer my question.”

“Just following your lead, princess.”

Kate reaches over and takes her coffee back.

Behind them, there is a knock on the door.

“You’re injured,” Kate says, rising from the couch and straightening her shirt. “Let me get it.”

“You’re a good samaritan,” Clint says drily from behind her. She ignores him.

Kate opens the door and smiles politely at the pizza delivery man standing in Clint’s doorway.

At the —

“Clint, it looks like you owe somebody some money,” she says crisply, turning on her heel and ignoring Clint’s dumb, chortling laughter.

On the little bar separating the kitchen from the living room, Clint’s phone buzzes.

“Roped into charity event at shriners memorial. Catch u later.”

Kate stares at the “u” in that text like it’s an extra puzzle piece from her box, tumbling out after she’s already completed the picture, and doesn’t look up until Clint places the boxes down next to her and grabs them beer from the fridge. She thinks she does a good job at not looking crestfallen.

 

 

*

Tony Stark smells of so much aftershave Kate nearly stumbles backwards as he passes her.

“I have that effect on women,” he says without looking up from his phone. The heels on his nice leather loafers _click-clack_ crisply on the polished floors of Avengers Tower as he walks towards the elevator at the end of the hall. It opens for him immediately.

“You have that effect on anyone with a nose,” she shoots back, eyes watering.

There’s a startled guffaw somewhere around the corner behind her, but Clint and Dr. Banner walk out of the lab a few feet to her right, both pink and shuffling awkwardly, and Kate zeroes in on them like she’s on a rooftop somewhere, her bow and aim steady, wind in her hair.

“Dr. Banner! It’s so nice to meet you finally,” Kate smiles, saccharine. She thinks she can watch his curls fluff and expand in real time as he looks determinedly at a spot above her left ear.

“Please, call me Bruce. I’m happy to meet you, too.”

“Clint’s told me so much about you,” she purrs, wrapping an arm around Clint’s waist to pinch at his hip.

“And I’ve told him what a spoiled brat you are,” Clint murmurs into the crown of her hair, hiding it behind what looks like an affectionate nuzzle. “I will spread this information to Steve if you push it.”

Kate smiles up at him, frozen like her mouth is being stretched open at the dentist. “I don’t know why you think I would care about that, Barton.”

Bruce shifts on his feet in front of them.

“I don’t want to keep you from your lunch date, or whatever,” she says breezily, jostling the bag slung across her back. “I just came to mooch on that nice range you keep hidden in the basement.”

“I am going to kill you. Slowly,” Clint breathes.

“It was nice to meet you!” She calls over her shoulder, sauntering off. The elevator smells like Tony’s aftershave as she descends the seven floors to the shooting range, and Kate thinks it’s probably karma for something.

 

 

*

Kate stays at the range for longer than she planned on, for a dumb reason even she can’t bring herself to admit.

No one bothers her as she goes through arrow after arrow, even playing around with some of the trick ones Clint kept trying to shove down her throat. She resorts to fiddling with a few of the smaller Berettas on the wall behind her before finding it in her to pack her things and walk away with some of her dignity intact.

Her hair is sticky with sweat as she pulls it into a sloppy bun en route to the elevator, her shoulders and back a low, pleasant burn, her hands numb.

There’s movement to her left, and there’s enough adrenaline still coursing through her body she jumps to look at it. It’s stupid, like some random thug could just bust up into Avengers Tower to acost her in the basement.

Stupid.

Kate tiptoes forward, regardless.

Even in the basement, the Tower is mostly reinforced glass and steel and polished tile. The shooting range has two long rectangular windows, nearly floor to ceiling, for observers to watch Clint fire boomerangs with his toes or whatever he liked to do with his time, and the gym down the hall has one similarly placed. That’s where she sees Steve Rogers — _Steven Grant Rogers_ — punching at an old school sandbag, his broad back to her.

She’s not _that_ tired.

Kate is quiet as she’s able to be, walking into the gym. Though he’s got a pair of headphones in and the door is in his periphery, he stiffens when it swings shut behind her.

“...Sorry. Did you want to be alone?”

Steve pulls at the headphones and looks at her for a minute.

“You’re Clint’s, right?”

Kate stiffens, herself. “I’m Kate.”

There are two busted sandbags propped on the wall next to him, and three crisp new ones beside. It smells like sweat and antibacterial soap and rubber, and the normalness of it all sits funny.

Steve’s lips purse, but he gestures to his bag finally. “If you don’t mind waiting for the bag, I don’t mind.”

Kate sets her bag down next to the treadmill nearest to the door. “Take your time, my arms are noodles and I won’t be using it. I probably wouldn’t on a good day,” she tries for a grin.

She wishes, a bit, that Steve would have just told her to go away, if he really wanted to be alone. It would be better than watching him tense up like this, all guarded, hunched shoulders and wary eyes. Kate isn’t that annoying.

But she’s in it now, and even if running is the last thing she wants to do she dials up the incline on the treadmill and sets to it. Steve is slow in returning to is sandbag, and he doesn’t put his headphones back in.

 

 

*

Two days later, Kate goes back to the gym in the Tower. You shouldn’t meet your heroes, but you also shouldn’t leave your heroes after a miserable five mile run in sullen, reluctant companionship and a silent non-goodbye.

And Steve is an Actual Hero. Capital H. Kate would never admit that to anyone — especially Clint, and often to herself. Kate has watched him on the television miss targets with his shield that she or Clint could hit easily, seen him stumble backwards and not land on his feet. He’s strong, he’s fast, but he’s not superhuman. Not really. Not in the ways that matter. But he’s good, and he does hard things because it’s the right thing to do, and Kate loves that in the young, dumb, stupid way that she used to love _Sailor Moon_.

She winces as she opens the door. She shouldn’t lead with that.

No one is there, but she isn’t a total amateur. She’d hacked into the Tower’s surveillance system the afternoon prior and examined the footage from the past two weeks and knows that barring any city or worldwide disasters, Steve comes to the gym twice a day; at five thirty in the morning and eight-thirty at night.

Kate is stretching near the free weights, in front of the long mirror making up the northern wall of the room, when Steve comes in. He clears his throat like he doesn’t already have her attention.

“...Sorry. Did you want to be alone?”

He is looking at her balefully, suspicious like he knows she is up to something. It is decidedly not like Captain America.

  
Clint must be a better bro than he pretends to be, to have not told Steve that she is _always_ up to something. He is still a shithead.

“If you can behave, you can stay,” she smiles. He raises his eyebrows, and it takes him a minute to move. Good. He’s a hero, (she isn’t ready for any of that “ _her hero_ ” stuff) but she’s not a fangirl like Billy Kaplan. He’s just a guy. She’s not wholly without a spine.

Kate is surprised when he starts stretching near the free weights himself. Several feet apart, nearly at the opposite end of the mirror, but it’s more than she would have guessed. He’s almost oddly acrobatic, not bound by the constraints of his thick muscle at all. Like Clint, maybe, who also looks stockier than the lightness on his feet gives away. Steve arches smoothly into a backbend and Kate nearly bites her tongue in half.

_Can you do a split?_

She picks up her usual thirty pound weights and decidedly tries to not look like she is staring. He’s probably used to that, but he seems to pick times when the gym is unoccupied, and Kate would hazard a guess it’s for a reason. She doesn’t want him to feel like a zoo animal.

It is quiet.

“You’re locking your elbows too much,” he tells her gruffly as he walks to the sandbag.

Kate nearly drops the weights.

 

 

*

She goes to the gym nearly every day for the next two weeks, and she and Steve don’t exchange hardly any more words after he corrects her hold on the weights.

It’s hard getting up early this morning, and it’s harder ordering two cups of coffee at Starbucks. She’s never met him in the morning, before, and if she’s about to get her feelings hurt she’s going to do it properly caffeinated.

He’s doing a hamstring stretch with his toe pressed against the mirrored wall, his big palms flat against it, when she enters. His face is all open, sleep mussed surprise when she sits the coffee down six inches from his foot. She walks to “her” corner silently, and she stares at the smudges his hands leave on the mirror when he reaches for the drink.

“Good morning.”

“...Good morning, Kate.”

 

 

*

Kate isn’t desperate for attention or validation or recognition or whatever else Clint might say about her, and she doesn’t go to the gym that night.

The next night, though, Kate asks what’s on his iPod. His taste is terrible, and he runs the belt out on the treadmill in stony silence when she can’t contain her laughter.

 

 

*

There’s a giant slug in Midtown, and Kate is in class but Clint tries to play big damn hero, and he’s in the hospital for two weeks. Everyone else is fine, of course. Clint says Steve cracked two ribs that were healed in about three hours, Natasha broke the heels off of her favorite boots.

It’s two and a half weeks before Kate makes it back to the gym. The first night, Steve isn’t even there. She spends five half hearted minutes on the elliptical and the next thirty on her phone sat on the stationary bike.

Steve isn’t superhuman. But he’s more than she is, and more than Clint. She must have forgotten.

 

 

*

Steve nearly loses his left eye the first time he tries to walk into the shooting range.

“Holy _shit_!” She screeches, grabbing the fletching of her notched arrow and fumbling the shot at the last second. It lodges into the wall three and a half inches from his ear.

“Are you insane?” Kate hisses. Steve only blinks at her owlishly. “Do you have a death wish? Don’t sneak up on armed people like that!”

“...What? You can play in my sandbox, but I can’t come to yours?”

Kate settles her weight back on her heels. That was nearly teasing. That was nearly good-humor, from Steve. He’s not really smiling, but he isn’t grumbling or scowling either.

“I bring you coffee when I visit your sandbox,” she says slowly, testing the waters with each carefully chosen word. “And actual good music recommendations, sorely missing from your life. Not to mention my stellar company.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. It settles as warm as a struck match behind her solar plexus.

“You’re a good shot.”

“I know.”

“I mean, better than good, really. You’re a marksman,” Steve says lightly, reaching for a sturdy looking Glock with lots of recoil on the display. “Would you mind if I shoot with you?”

He pauses, fiddling for bullets in the long cabinet underneath the gun display. “Or do you want to be alone?”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “Can you shoot? Really shoot?”

“Not like you,” Steve shrugs easily. She likes how easily he acknowledges being bettered at something. She likes how easily he acknowledges her.

“Show me what you can do.”

“I don’t know the first thing about archery.”

“I know my way around a gun, Steve. Use what you have in your hands.”

“I didn’t think that Hawkeye shot guns.”

“I can shoot anything.”

Steve is slow stepping in front of her, but his movements are sure and steady as he raises his pistol and releases the safety.

He’s freshly showered, and her cheeks heat pink smelling the clean warmth on his skin, seeing his thick, damp hair barely curl at the nape of his neck.

She clears her throat.

“Your left shoulder is too high. You’re tensing up anticipating the recoil but it’s throwing your aim to the right of where you want it to be.”

He raises his eyebrow incredulously.

“Sorry,” she mutters. “I can’t help myself. Go ahead, let me look at you.”

 _Let me look at you._ She wants to kick herself.

She watches his grip shift. Had she made him that uncomfortable?

He flies through the rounds on the Glock quickly, and Kate is very careful trying to choose her next words to be more tactful than she is known for.

“That bad, huh?”

That’s a real grin, there. A slim, sharp thing like the little knife in her purse that Kate much prefers to the wide, all-teeth smile on his lunch boxes and figurines, now that she knows she has the choice between them.

“When is the last time you shot? Really shot?”

Steve licks at his lips, and when he speaks he’s looking at the crown of her head.

“I...there were other boys on our team that were better shots than me. Who enjoyed it more. I relied on hi—them. I relied on them. Too much, maybe. The last time I did anything like this was...1944 with some glass bottles? We were drunk and stole a car in Poland. They were drunk, I mean. Not me. Not since 1940.”

Kate soaks his words up like a sponge, hoarding them close with all the new puzzle pieces she’s collecting. What had she done to deserve all this from such a terse, private man?

Steve shifts on his feet, and she watches his face shutter up, brick by brick, closing down the longer she watches him dumbly.

“Sorry! Sorry. I was in my mind palace.”

 _Billy Kaplan,_ she swears to herself, wincing, _I am going to kill you for introducing that term to my vocabulary._

Steve visibly bites the inside of his cheek, eyes crinkling at the corners. Not as vulnerable as before, but not as guarded either.

“You’re, uhm,” she clears her throat. “You’re overcorrecting now because you’re used to the older, heavier models. You don’t need to use the same grip on the new stuff, it’s weighted more evenly.”

Steve looks down at the gun in his hands like he’s never seen it before.

“Is that why you picked something with all that recoil?” She asks suddenly. “That one kicks like a mule, especially for its size.”

“...What would you recommend, then, Miss Bishop?”

Kate squirms as warm pleasure unfurls in her belly, and something hot licks up her spine.

“Something bigger. Break you in slow.”

It’s not _suggestive_ , except it _is_.

They pull from the rifles instead of the handguns, work their way down from the Barrett .50 caliber to the M16A4, and when JARVIS interrupts them Steve is turning a M14 in his hands speculatively.

“Captain Rogers, Mr. Wilson is here to see you. He says you have a date.”

Kate nearly drops the rag she’s using to polish her bow, sat up on the cabinet. _Thank you, JARVIS, for keeping me in my lane._

“Thank you, JARVIS. Tell him I’ll be up.”

Steve hangs the M14 up on the display and leans up on the cabinet only maybe a foot away from her.

“I’ve never had Ethiopian food,” he says. Kate tries to avoid looking at the ropes of muscle in his arms as he crosses them across his chest. “Sam is sure I’ll hate it, but somehow we are going anyway.”

“I can’t wait to hear about it,” she manages. It’s quiet.

“They should have put you to work in the service, I think. I feel like I can at least get a few hits on a slow moving house.”

Kate hops down to the floor, opens the cabinet to shelve the polish.

“I don’t think my gender would have endeared me to that type of job with those types of men.”

“Those types of men?”

Kate looks up at him, mouth already open, but she stops herself.

Steve is staring at her shoulder. She follows his gaze, brow furrowed, and sees polish on her skin.

“You know the type,” she says lowly, raising her eyes to meet his.

Steve just shrugs, clears his throat.

“Maybe I am the type.”

 

 

*

Kate is a planner, she’s always been. But to herself she can admit fallibility.

Like how she didn’t think about how it would work if she and Steve had to actually do their jobs together. Mostly she figured it wouldn’t actually make a difference, they are really barely friends.

She and Clint are perched on opposite ends of the block, looking down at the skirmish below. They flick their palm mirrors in morse code from their respective rooftops.

“Fucking robots.”

“Fucking Justin Hammer.”

“Hey. Bishop. Bishop. Hawkeye.”

“Shit. Yes. What.”

Kate watches one of Clint’s arrows soar into her side of the block. It fries the little whirring bot latched onto Natasha’s right leg.

“Where’s your eye, Bishop. Focus.”

“Sorry.”

It’s on Steve, of course. He’s light on his feet and fights like he’s in a bar brawl, like he’s never really been taught how. He wastes too much of his energy on his swings and has the same issue blocking on his left that Kate herself has. If he weren’t special, he’d be dead.

Kate sees Clint’s mirror flash, but she doesn’t see what he says. She lets two arrows loose at once, thinning the herd coming Steve’s way from around the corner. Three more follow in quick succession.

Sam’s voice buzzes at the comm in her ear.

“Favorite Hawkeye, are you available for a social call?”

He swoops down onto the ledge next to her without waiting for an answer, wings tucked in close.

“Can you aim for the two of my birds above that brewery there?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that.”

“You’re a star. Use those funny arrows with the wire, hook them together. I have a surprise planned.”

“Sam? Who do I hear on the comms with you?”

“The voice of your conscience, Cap,” Sam laughs, diving off the roof with the sunlight reflecting off of his wings. One day, she will find the right bribe to get a solo ride on those.

There’s an explosion as the birds that Kate roped together start herding the bots close and their motion sensors start firing at each other.

“Stark is not going to like rebuilding those birds for you.” Natasha’s voice is soft and smooth as ever, even over the crackling comm. Kate wonders if she is ever winded.

“Stark remains free to kiss my ass,” Sam breezes back.

“Two left,” Steve says curtly.

“Cap is pissed,” Clint signs.

“He’s always grumpy,” she sends back.

Teddy Altman comes careening into the block below, and his massive green fists smash the last two bots into pieces with enough efficacy the other Green Guy would be impressed.

“Oh good,” he pants, loud enough Kate can hear him from the roof above. “I thought I was late.”

“Is that all?” Steve calls. “Hawkeye?”

“Clear,” Kate signs, scanning the block.

“Clear,” Clint signs back. “Thank Christ.”

She shoulders her bow and quiver with a big relieved sigh. She’s glad to be done, her thighs were starting to cramp.

“Hey Sam, will you pick me up, pretty please? I don’t want to stairs today.”

“You just want to try the wings.”

(He comes to pick her up anyway. It is _awesome._ Sam is her favorite.)

“What about original Hawkeye?” Clint complains loudly.

“Men your age need to stay active. Take the stairs, I’m not coming back up.”

Teddy punches her shoulder, and she doesn’t hear Clint’s reply.

“Hey Katie, I was wondering where you ran off to. Tommy thought you were mad about losing another rummy game.”

“First of all, I wasn’t losing. Secondly, you all know how I love danger and imminent death.”

“I just wanted to put off working on my Spanish final, you’re so noble.”

She pinches his cheek, grinning, until a self-righteous shadow of a statue looms over them.

“ _Well_ , uh,” Teddy stumbles, “I’m going to get a picture with Sam and make Billy jealous. I’ll see you later, Kate.”

“What are you doing here, Kate?” Steve’s jaw is clenched, and he glares down his long nose at her like she’s in the principal’s office. Rude.

“Well, until very recently, fighting Justin Hammer’s asshole robots. What have you been up to? Caught any good re-runs on Bravo? Natasha told me you binge that when you’re bored.”

“ _Don’t_ —” he hisses, eyes the blue of fire that’s too hot, too close.

“No, _you_ don’t. What’s your problem? Are you my dad now? I had your back out there, don’t act like —”

“Clint had no business bringing you here.”

“Clint knows he can’t ‘bring’ Kate anywhere,” Clint says drily, walking out of the building next to them with his uncanny timing. “Steve, buddy, just leave it. Kate’s fine, she’s good. She’ll wear you down either way.”

Kate feels the same new, warm joy when Clint comments on her usefulness as she did the first time he said she had skills she could use for good. She feels it now, but she doesn’t let it water down her stare-down with Steve.

“She’s so young —”

“Do you know how Google works, Steve?” She snaps.

Steve’s eyes flash a warning in the sunlight, the color of deep water, still and deceptive of all the shit that could eat you alive beneath.

“You were nineteen when you finally enlisted, and twenty when they gave you the juice —”

“I _remember_ ,” he growls.

“And I’m twenty-three, you pigheaded — you _pigheaded ass_! So don’t do that Grandpa Safety act with me!”

“Grandpa Safety,” Natasha murmurs, grinning while Sam pulls out his phone.

“Guess who’s Grandpa Safety in the contacts now?” He singsongs. Steve ignores both of them.

“You’re good, and you’re not wrong about me being concerned for your safety,” Steve says shortly. “Forgive me if that seems insulting or overbearing to your delicate ego. I’ve seen enough men — and _women_ — die that I hope it excuses my behavior.”

Kate gapes at his retreating back as he turns heel and stalks off. Sam smiles at her apologetically before following.

Over the rising thud of her blood pressure, Kate hears Clint’s distinctive, acrobat’s footsteps approach.

“Don’t,” she snarls. She follows Steve’s lead, just like he wanted, and she leaves.

 

 

*

Kate oversleeps the next morning. She talks herself into and out of going to the gym no less than five times.

She’s an hour late pulling the door open, but the gym is empty. Kate kicks the door closed before turning on the sandbag, imagining a certain stupid face as her punches land. She’s never used it before; it feels like she’s punching concrete. her knuckles are throbbing numb and already bruising when she sees the coffees sitting by the free weights. Both are full, and cold.

“Son of a _bitch_.”

 

 

*

This is the dumbest thing that Kate has ever done.

She has never felt the threat of rejection like this, because she rarely makes moves she doesn’t know the most likely three outcomes, at least.

Clint has an apartment in the Tower, officially. All of the old crew did, but only Natasha and Sam stayed in theirs consistently.

But Steve is in the Tower now. Kate checked the surveillance cameras.

Her hands tremble around the bags in her hands when she kicks at the door.

“Alright, shut up and let me talk first,” she says to Steve’s bare feet.

His very brown, bare feet.

“What.”

“Don’t worry about it, Hawkgirl. I don’t want to be in the crosshairs of whatever you’re here for.”

“And Natasha calls you birdbrain,” she tuts. “Is he inside?”

Sam slips his shoes on by the door and steps out into the hall. “He’s all yours. Hey, good luck with this, buddy!” He calls over his shoulder. He’s cackling the entire way down the hall.

Steve is leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, by the time she looks back inside the apartment.

Her lips are very dry, and Kate licks at them uselessly.

“Let me in, Steve.”

“You’re going to come in even if I invite you or not.”

She huffs. “Hold this damn bag, it’s heavy.”

Kate watches Steve make the slow decision to reach out. She tries to be patient. She doesn’t speak again until it’s in his hand. “No, if you...if you don’t want me here, I’ll go. I won’t beg. You know that, I think.”

“Yeah,” Steve sighs. “I know.”

He takes the other bag from her hands as well and lets her in.

“I am sorry for yesterday,” she says evenly, watching him set the bag’s contents on the island in his barren kitchen. His apartment is clean by virtue of disuse, and it smells almost oddly like lavender until she catches sight of the diffuser in the living room. She didn’t expect that.

“I’m sorry, too,” he says stiffly.

Kate leans over the island to peer at him closely. “You know why we could be good friends, Steve? We both hate apologizing, and we are both shit at it.”

Steve snorts. “You aren’t wrong about that last bit.”

“I think no one wants to make Captain America apologize to them, it triggers some weird guilt complex.”

His face shutters back up. She ploughs on.

“But I don’t want Captain America to do _shit_ for me. I just want Steve Rogers.”

There is a crease between his brows that almost makes him look his real age as he stares at her over the cartons of takeout and the grocery store wine and cannolis, like he’s trying to riddle her words out, shake any untruth or intention out of them like laundry on a line. His eyelashes are so long Kate thinks a determined soul could braid them.

“To apologize, I mean,” she tacks on when his silence drags on to awkwardness. “I mean, for anything. But now, in this instance.”

“I know,” Steve says softly. Kate feels herself settle back in her skin.

“So anyway, we’re having dinner, I don’t care if you’ve already eaten. I’m also going to pick the thing we watch, because I don’t trust your taste. Make me a plate.”

“Yes, Kate.”

“That’s the best ‘I’m sorry’ I could ever hope to hear. One more time, please, Stevie.”

He fumbles with the fork in his hands. She feels her heart high in her throat. Why had she said that? And now, when they were just barely starting to get back on whatever track they’d been paving for themselves, agonizingly slow, the past few weeks? He answers, though. He gives her what she wants, and he’s looking almost serene when he answers.

“Yes, Kate.”

 

 

*

“What are you doing, Kate?”

“Crossword, Hawkeye. What about you?”

“I mean with Steve.”

Kate blinks, makes a show of turning around and looking over her shoulder in Clint’s shitty, definitely not Avengers Tower apartment.

“It’s just the two of us, Clint. Did you get into weird mushrooms again?”

Clint puts his hand flat on Kate’s crossword. His voice is unusually serious.

“Kate.”

“Clint,” she says slowly. “You are a lot of things to me. But —”

“I’m not here to judge you, Katie. Your personal stuff is your own, it’s always been...you know I won’t pry. It’s not what we do. But I feel...you know I…” Clint looks above her head, looks pained when he speaks, “I love you, Kate. I just want you to think about this.”

“You know, I got a similar speech when you started training with me. We aren’t hurting each other, are we? Do you think I’m taking advantage of you? Are you taking advantage of me?” She says evenly.

“We’re _us_ , Kate.”

“What are you worried about, exactly? I’m a grown woman, and Steve’s a good man. We’re friends. Getting there, anyway. You know how he is. So what’s the issue?”

She looks him in the eye, knows this is his weak point.

“Are you worried about us having sex?”

Clint screams and claps his hands to his ears. “Kate, _please_.”

She shrugs. “We aren’t. I just want to understand you, Clint. You started this heart-to-heart, is this not what you wanted?”

“You are a harsh, evil woman.” He points at her as he exits to his bedroom. “I change my mind, I wish Steve luck.”

 

 

*

She didn’t lie to Clint. She doesn’t lie, not to Clint. Never.

But to herself? Sometimes.

She and Steve are friends. He lets her do that, now. Most days. She likes what he offers; Kate is under the growing impression she would take it even if she didn’t. They are not having sex. Kate doubts that they ever will, but sometimes she catches herself thinking about it.

Steve is a good man, and Kate is sure part of the reason he lets himself sometimes put his wall down when she’s around is because she keeps her expectations low. With a few exceptions, most of whom live in the Tower, Steve doesn’t know anyone who doesn’t want something from him, in some form or another.

And that includes sex. Whoever Steve is clearly still holding out for isn’t dead to Steve, and Kate reminds herself of that when the light throws him into perfect relief in his kitchen, when he lets her spar with him and their skin brushes the right way, when he smiles taking a sip of coffee she made just right, when his big hands and hers are a tangle correcting his grip on the range, the smell of his skin keeping her close a beat too long.

Sometimes Kate knows he catches her faltering, leaning into that pipe dream. He leans back into Captain Rogers — different from Captain America, different from Steve Rogers, most different from Stevie — when that happens, and Kate can take a hint.

She didn’t lie to Clint. She wishes she could avoid lying to everyone else.

 

 

*

It is Steve’s birthday.

Well. It is close to Steve’s birthday. His actual birthday is all full of big, weird parties and fundraisers and press shit that she knows Steve hates but somehow agreed to do anyway. But it’s close enough.

So, it is Steve’s birthday, and Kate has gifts for both of them were they are sat on his overstuffed couch in his Avengers Tower apartment (she hasn’t yet been to what she can’t help but call his “real” apartment), watching _The Real Housewives of New Jersey_ , sunlight falling to a heavy dusk behind his big, fancy windows.

Kate takes hers, first.

Slowly, she inches her toes under his thigh. She hasn't been so nervous about touching someone since maybe middle school. Predictably, Steve stiffens, and his brow is furrowed when he turns to look at her.

"I got you something for your birthday."

Steve's face shutters up as he looks meaningfully from her face to his thigh.

"Uhm! It's in the bag."

"You didn't have to," Steve says carefully as he drags it onto his lap. It looks funny, the bright bag and tissue paper and Steve's Grumpy Grandpa Safety face.

"I've got to blow my inheritance somehow," she grins.

There's the cologne — nothing weird about that, she gets some for Clint and Eli and Tommy every year for their birthdays, too, even though she usually doesn't track down vintage bottles for them. Maybe that was overkill? — then a few big vinyl records. He was still into those, cliche as it was, but his collection was limited by his dubious taste. Steve's hands are unbearably careful as he marvels over the new ones silently: Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash.

The last thing he pulls out is the card. He mouths the words silently as he reads them, a secret habit he has that she would never bring up lest he stop doing it.

Steve puts them all on the table. He swallows twice before he leans over.

Kate is going to have an aneurysm.

His hand is warm and dry cupping one side of her face, and he hardly brushes her cheek at all with his mouth before he pulls back, slowly.

"Thank you, Kate."

She has to blink a few times to clear the fog settled in her useless brain.

"Happy birthday, Steve."

He squeezes the top of her foot with his big, rough hand, just briefly, a passing touch. "Thanks for not getting me art supplies or something. My birthday and Christmas I always get loaded down with more than I can use."

"I don't know anything about art, I would have just gotten you Crayolas."

"Crayolas are more than I used to have to work with."

Kate dares to press her foot further under his thigh. Her cheek still tingles where his stubble rasped her skin.

"I was thinking it was time we try some arrows in the range, whenever you're up to it."

"You don't want a man to get too cocky, right?" He snorts.

"You're just playing around with the little handguns now, you can shoot them fine. You won't get better until you try mastering another medium."

"Thor brought me some Asgardian ale last time he was down. I think I'm going to drink it tonight...for my birthday, you know. So maybe tomorrow, I'll let you embarrass me with your arrows."

“Maybe tomorrow, just for your birthday, I’ll consider not embarrassing you to the point of tears.”

The Asgardian ale tastes like honeyed piss when she steals a sip, thinking Steve isn't looking. It tastes horrible, and she doesn't remember much more after that.

She wakes the next morning in a strange bed. She's not been tucked in or anything weird, but has curled around a lumpy pillow on top of clean smelling sheets. Steve-smelling sheets.

Kate sits up and immediately falls back down, clutching her splitting, throbbing, aching head.

_Asgard is a cursed place. I wish Thor not one good day._

It's several long minutes before Kate can drag herself out of the bed and stumble into the living room. It's empty, but there's a blanket and a pillow rumpled on the couch.

Kate leaves a note on the back of the envelope of Steve's birthday card before leaving for Clint's apartment the floor above to recover.

_Sorry for whatever embarrassing shit I surely did but can't remember last night. I blame Thor entirely. I would text you this, but I don't have your number. Anyway. In the future, the next time we get into space liquor, please don't give up your bed on my account. Also in the future ask Thor to give you the antidote to that poison in advance._

_I'll see you tonight? :) Can't wait to embarrass you and even the score._

_Happy birthday, Stevie._

 

 

*

Kate does not see him at the range that night, though she stays there for two hours. She doesn’t see him at the gym the next morning, or the next night.

She holes up in her own apartment, for once. Clint calls and she ignores it, Billy comes by and can only stand her company for twenty minutes before leaving, and Oscorp releases some bio-engineered turtles into the sewers and Kate just stays in bed and lets the rest of the world deal with it.

 

 

*

“You don’t have my pizza.”

Steve rubs the back of his neck awkwardly in her doorway.

“No...I don’t.”

He’s fresh from a run, his shirt collared in sweat, damp in his hair and above his lip. His legs are dusted in golden hair and slimmer than maybe the broadness of his chest and thickness of his arms would suggest; runner’s legs that she can imagine once belonged to a body that used to be smaller.

“How did you find my apartment, Steve?”

Kate crosses her arms across her chest and props herself up on the doorway. Partially this is to keep him from crossing the threshold, though she knows he wouldn't enter without an invitation. He’s prone to turning her down even if she gave him one stamped in gold leaf. Partially she’s braless in a tank top she reserves for sleep due to sheerness and she can’t embarrass herself any more in front of this man.

“Does it matter?”

She looks up at him coolly. “You’re right, you decide what matters. So go ahead and tell me —”

Steve reaches out and tucks some of her hair behind her ear.

“I just...haven’t seen you around. I wanted to see if you’re okay.”

“Am I missing a chip or something? Are you? Don’t — don’t beg me to do something and then act like a kicked puppy when I take a hint.”

“Beg you to do something?”

“This weird wall of man-pain you’ve got that you keep hiding behind and pushing me away from before standing me up, or whatever.”

His hand drops.

“Weird wall of man pain?”

“Don’t play dumb, Steve Rogers, I will knock the shit out of you.”

They look at each other for a minute. Steve is frowning like he’s never seen her before.

“I...never meant you to think I didn’t want you around.”

The pizza arrives behind Steve. Kate grumbles. He wouldn’t ruin pizza for her.

“Get inside before someone recognizes you, I don’t want them hanging around my apartment waiting to catch a glimpse from now on.”

Steve enters wordlessly while Kate pays the delivery person and sends them on their merry way. _Do you want to trade places, nameless pizza man?_

She kicks the door closed behind her. Steve is a good man, but he’s stubborn, she knows that. He’s proud, she knows that, too. What had it taken for him to come here and meet her like this?

“Look,” Kate says as she sets the box on her coffee table, in front of where Steve sits in her favorite spot. “I like you, Steve. I think you’re a good man.”

She grabs two beers from her fridge and sets one down in front of him wordlessly. “I like you, and I don’t want to put any extra shit on your plate, I know you have enough as it is. But I can’t...I don’t like feeling like I’m always just waiting for you to run. I can’t imagine what you feel like or what you want.”

She pauses, takes a sip of her beer.

“You’re too thick-headed for me to get a good idea of what’s going on in there.”

Steve slowly picks up his bottle. His mouth might twitch behind it. Kate grabs for a slice of pizza as she continues.

“I don’t want to want anything from you but your friendship, Steve, if you can give me that. If you can’t, I’ll be bummed but I get it. Just like, let me live with it. In or out.”

“...You don’t want to want anything but that? What does that mean?”

Kate nearly drops the pizza in her hands. Shit. Shit. Shit. She sets it back in the box, wipes some of the grease on her yoga pants. He doesn’t speak or move as she scrambles for a swerve or a save to make up for her dumb, honest mouth.

Clearing her throat, she looks up at Steve’s carefully blank face. She means it when she says she wants to be friends. Kate doesn’t want to make Steve uncomfortable, doesn’t want to push him away, but she’s an honest friend. She owes him that.

“Why do they photoshop your pictures so much, Steve?”

He blinks owlishly, head cocked to the side.

“The serum did a lot for me, but it didn’t make me any less of a sorry looking son of a bitch. That’s what Bucky said, anyway.”

She smiles as she leans back on the couch. If she were with Clint or Tommy, she’d swing her feet onto his lap. But Steve is Steve. She curls them underneath her.

“You’re better looking in person. More human...even with the bushy eyebrows.”

“Are you avoiding my question?”

She huffs. “I’m answering it, you moron.”

Kate weighs every word out of her mouth carefully, judges Steve’s reaction while she lays each out evenly as brick, finishing paving that road they had been treading together. Maybe it diverges into two at this fork they’re in, but Kate won’t know until they tread it fully.

“You decent, grumpy, funny, self-deprecating, handsome, moron.”

There is ringing silence. Steve puts his beer down. He doesn’t use the coaster.

“I asked Clint,” Steve says lowly. His eyes are all shining black pupil roving over her face. “I asked him where you lived, I had to beg. He’s a good friend to you.”

Clint and Steve have the same “I hate talking about feelings” face. Kate tries to not guess where this is going.

“I want you around. I want you to want to be around. You’re a good girl, you’re sharp and kinder than I deserve, knowing how I can be...how I can be. Always looking for a fight when there’s not one. And I just don’t want to saddle you down with me and my — what was it? Weird wall of man pain?”

“You don’t think that’s my choice to make?”

“If it was, what would you choose?”

Kate catches his eyes drifting to her chest. She licks her lips and looks at him carefully.

“I’d choose you staying here and helping me finish this pizza, and the rest of my beer in the fridge. I’d choose you letting me choose the movie we watch.”

Kate leans over and puts his beer on the coaster. “I’d choose you, staying.”

They don’t say much else after Kate sits back on the couch, six inches still between them. Steve’s words mean a lot — mean enough she hasn’t properly processed them in their due diligence, yet, but that will have to wait until he leaves — but he spooks like a horse, she’s seen it. No sudden movements, no funny business. He rests his arm on the back of the couch, but not across her shoulders. They watch _Kingsman_ then _Anastasia_ and finish the last of the beer midway through _The Emperor’s New Groove_ , and Kate is happy to leave it at that.

Steve lets Kate walk him to the front door of her building, weak drizzle falling invisible and silent in the inky dark around them, cool and sweet-smelling. As Steve’s back retreats into the loud Tribeca evening, Kate thinks it’s a good backdrop for a first kiss. Romantic, and shit. She imagines all the different ways it could have happened walking back to her apartment. Her favorite is this:

She’s mid-sentence when he cups her face and kisses her, closed mouth, their lips dry and brushing like kindling. His grin is sharp when he pulls away. She plays it on loop as she cleans up the condensation still on her coffee table from his beer.

 

 

*

He presses his hand to the small of her back the next morning in the gym, correcting her hold on the new forty-five pound weight she’s been using.

“You are _fucking Captain America_ ,” Billy squeals when they meet for coffee that afternoon. “Teddy _saw_ you two _eyefucking_ —”

“I will kill you slowly, William Kaplan. Consider your next words.”

“...About how much I love you, what a gem you are? How forgiving and merciful? How interested you are in sharing the very explicit details of your sexual adventures with your good friend Billy?”

 

 

*

Kate presses a kiss mostly on his cheek and just barely — _barely_ — on the very corner of his mouth when he lands his first bullseye with an arrow. For a moment, she doesn’t pull away in hopes he’ll turn his head and meet her where she’s waiting. For a moment, she thinks he might. He’s grinning as he pulls away. After a moment, she is, too.

 

 

*

Steve slots their rough, calloused hands together when he asks her to his real apartment. Kate says no, just to be an asshole, before saying yes. Sam and Bruce are eavesdropping around the corner, and both of them wind up owing Natasha money. Kate demands a cut of it, and Natasha obliges. She has always been Kate's favorite.

 

 

*

The real apartment is a brownstone that is warm and lonely all at once. It’s full of the little things that show an actual human inhabits the space, but only one, and only sometimes. Most of it is done in soft blues and yellows, and it smells like the lavender she knows now he keeps in the diffusers he unexpectedly loves and the candles she sees burning in the kitchen and the foyer. There’s clutter on the shelves, there are scuff marks on the hardwood floors, and a few dirty dishes in the sink, but the furniture is hardly worn from use, and Steve doesn’t know what switches turn on which lights in all the rooms, many of which are empty except for an occasional unpacked box. Steve lives like a man expecting and used to being alone.

“Pepper offered me her interior designer, but…”

“It’s your house. You need to do it yourself.”

“Something like that. I’m sure they would try and do it ‘vintage,’ or something cheesy. That’s how the apartment at the Tower was when I first moved in.”

“Was Tony trying to be funny?”

“Tony was trying to be _nice_.”

She and Steve both grimace, then laugh at each other across his little dining room table.

“I like your house. I think it suits you.”

Steve twirls the pasta on his fork silently, and Kate thinks she can tell now that he’s trying not to ask something.

“Do I want to know what that means?”

“It’s soft, and quiet, and it’s not fussy. It’s a lot of space for one man...enough space even for his manpain to fit in it.”

Kate digs back into her pasta and studiously ignores the flat look Steve shoots her across the table. Steve doesn’t speak for a long minute.

“Why did you become a marksman?”

“So I could reign vengeance over my enemies and fight global injustice,” she answers easily.

“I don’t know what sorry sap is dumb enough to be your enemy.”

Kate smiles, sips her wine. It’s a remarkably traditional date, but midway through her third bite of carbonara Kate realizes Steve hasn’t had many of these, really. He’s pulling from whatever source material he has.

And the pasta is pretty decent, all things considered. Sam said Steve was one of the worst cooks known to man, but Kate wouldn’t have guessed.

“I wanted to be good. To do good,” she says after a quiet, unhurried pause. “I wanted to do good for someone who might need it. I needed it, once. No one was there right when I thought I needed it, but I found Clint, after. And I found Tommy and Billy and the boys after...and everyone else,” she glances up at him under her lashes. “I guess what I mean is, I found the good people I needed at the time I actually needed them, really.”

Steve holds her gaze with his fork in midair. His throat bobs before he speaks again.

“The vengeance part is just a bonus, right?”

“There are a lot of bonuses, some of which I’m just now becoming familiar with.”

The swells and planes of Steve’s face are caught in flickering contrast from the candles around them. His cheeks are high but not like Sam’s are, his jaw is strong but not as square as his comic books would lead one to believe, and his brow is relaxed and, yes, a bit bushy while he smiles at her with his real, sharp, closed mouth grin, and he is beautiful sitting in his half lived-in apartment like this.

She looks back at her nearly empty plate.

“Does the lavender help you sleep? You always keep them running.”

Steve plays with his fork in the way her dad used to yell at her for. He doesn’t answer for a minute, and each word, when it comes, has a slow drag to it like it’s an anchor he’s pulling out, heavy even in his impressive hands.

“...My ma, she was a nurse, she always worried about smelling like the hospital or the sickbay when I was small. Thought it wouldn't help my asthma and stuff any, and it was just depressing. She wanted me to think of her smelling like something besides iodine,” Steve knocks his beer back for longer than Kate thinks is really necessary before speaking again.

“Renata...she was this incredible — amazing woman who made soaps, she lived the floor below us in our first apartment. She always put extra of whatever oils or dried stuff she had on hand into ours. Ma helped get her sister into one of the hospitals when they first emigrated from Poland and didn’t speak English. The doctors thought she had tuberculosis and wanted to send her to the sanatorium, they didn't even want to try and treat her or give her a proper exam. When ma died Renata would send — would send Buck and I the soaps instead. The lavender was what I liked best. Bucky liked the calendula,” Steve shakes himself back to the present with a little snort. “It was the most expensive, so of course he would. Sometimes Renata would send us a candle or just some flowers, just because she wanted us to be taken care of. She said Bucky reminded her of her son, but he stayed back in Lublin when she came to America.” Steve swallows thickly. “The best times...the ones I can remember best, smell like that.”

“No calendula, yet?” She asks after a very long moment’s deliberation. “I’m sure they sell that essential oil somewhere on the internet. We can find some together, if you want.”

“I have some. When Buck is back, I will put them on. I’m not...I don’t want to open them yet.”

Their plates are empty, and they wash up silently. Kate downs the rest of her wine in one gulp before handing it to Steve to wash. He smiles at her like she’s told a joke.

“Steve, that story about your mom and Bucky and Renata...that was sweet. Is it wholly inappropriate if we make out on your couch after that? Would that be disrespectful?”

Steve snorts, nearly drops the glass in his hands as he’s putting it away.

“I think, if I had to guess, it’s what Bucky would want.”

They don’t make it to the couch, not at first. Steve leans over and cups her face in his still soapy hands and presses their mouths together right at the sink.

 _Oh_. Oh, oh, oh.

Kate is careful putting her hands flat on Steve’s chest, and she doesn’t surge forward onto her tiptoes in a show of restraint she thinks she should be commended for.

His thumbs brush the tops of her cheekbones when he kisses her again, nipping at her bottom lip. There’s tenderness Kate didn’t expect in the gesture, and she’s still thinking about it when he hoists her up to the counter.

“Okay?” He murmurs against her mouth. Her eyes flutter open and she sees his brow furrowed like he’s actually worried Kate would reject him, now, here, after everything.

Kate grins and wraps her legs around his waist. She sucks his top lip into her mouth, and it’s answer enough for him to put his big hands back at her waist and squeeze as he leans into the kiss.

Steve’s hips stutter forward and he lets out an unbearably soft “ _ah_ ” when her mouth trails to that silky softness behind his ear, but when she starts to suck a bruise at the skin there he pulls away.

“Sorry?” She pants. He just shakes his head.

“No, me.” His pupils are blown out a fat black, and his face is soft and open when he leans forward to press a chaste kiss where her neck meets her shoulder. He sucks in a deep breath before speaking.

“Did you want to pick out a movie?”

“...Will you carry me to the couch?” She grins cheekily, high on the feeling she can ask just because she wants to, trying to memorize the spots of pink on his cheeks, his ears, the swollen red of his mouth. “Put those guns to good use for once.”

He rolls his eyes and she’s giggling in surprised delight when he hooks an arm behind her knees, one behind her shoulders, and walks her to his living room.

“I lift buses off of the elderly, rescue children from burning buildings, and cats from trees, and am not putting myself to good use unless I’m carrying you twelve feet to the left.”

Kate reaches up and pinches his nose.

“Humility is the only real superpower, Rogers.”

Steve rolls his eyes and doesn't answer. They watch _Twilight_ because Steve hasn’t seen it yet, and Kate thinks that’s a crime. He puts his arm around her shoulders and she tucks herself under his chin and explains some of the references he knows he doesn’t understand but won’t ask about.

“Wait until you read the books,” Kate tells him as Bella figures out Edward is a vampire on screen.

“Do I have to?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just ask me that.”

They fall asleep on the couch, and Steve misses out on the ridiculous prom scene. Kate will make him watch it again sometime.

 

 

*

Steve is playing Mary J. Blige while he mixes up Bisquick for pancakes the next morning.

Kate wraps her arms around his waist from behind after she stumbles into his kitchen, yawning and stretching, and she nuzzles into the soft cotton of his t-shirt.

“Finally, you’re showing promise. I’ll have to thank Sam for introducing you to the Queen.”

“There is no hateration or holleration in this dancery,” Steve says sternly, with a remarkably straight face. “I will deny you pancakes.”

Kate nearly pops a vessel bent over laughing, sliding down the cabinets next to him. He kicks her lightly when she’s wiping her tears, sprawled on the floor.

“I wish — I wish I got that on camera,” she chokes. “I want that on YouTube so bad.”

“Boy, am I going to enjoy eating all of these by myself,” he says loudly. She looks up from the floor and sees his ears are pink.

Kate stays down on the kitchen floor while he cooks. She wraps an arm around one of his ankles and leans her head against the muscle of his thigh and stares around at nothing in particular, thinking of nothing in particular.

Steve finally speaks as he flips the last pancake onto the second plate. “Can you stay?”

“If you want. I can split if you want to retreat into your manpain cave.”

Steve doesn’t answer, and after they eat their pancakes Kate makes herself at home in his shower. She’s pink cheeked with the illicit feeling of his washcloth under her breasts, between her legs, but she tells herself to get her shit together. She’s got his actual hands waiting for her outside.

She stops herself, one hand raised for the door, seeing his cologne on his sink. The same one she bought him — the only bottle on his sink. Kate stares at it for thirty seconds before she dares a spray on the back of her neck, patting her wrists on it. She wraps the towel around her tightly like a piece of armor before exiting.

Steve is in his bedroom when she walks into it, shirtless and digging in his drawers, his hair wet, sweatpants slung low on his hips.

“You have another shower,” she accuses him darkly. Kate watches Steve trace drops of water falling from her hair down her shoulders and into the towel before looking down steadily at her feet.

He is slow handing her a shirt. “I don’t keep any, uh, ladies underwear. So—”

Kate walks by him with more confidence than she feels, close enough her bare arm brushes the skin on his chest still warm and damp from his shower. She digs in his drawers and pulls out a pair of navy boxers. She keeps her back turned to him as she drops the towel, shucks the shirt on, then the underwear. If she makes an effort to stick her rear out and arch her back while doing so, he doesn’t seem moved enough by it to touch her.

She tries not to look crestfallen as she turns around.

“Thanks.”

He grabs her arm when she tries to brush past him again. His hand doesn’t quite fully reach all the way around her bicep. She likes that.

“Come here,” he murmurs, leaning down.

“You know, you don’t need to be a woman to have some nice lingerie,” she whispers conspiratorially when he’s close enough their lips brush. He frowns and pulls away, and pouts until Kate convinces him to rest his head in her lap midway through _New Moon_. His hair is very soft underneath her fingers. She watches him fall asleep but doesn’t make him rewatch the ending when he wakes up to Kate arranging gummy worms on his face.

 

 

*

She goes home later that night as the sky is just turning orange, still wearing his boxers under her jeans. She leaves her own underwear laid neatly on his pillow, and she gets a text message as she enters her apartment with a picture of them and a few carefully chosen emojis. She doesn’t text him back. She sleeps in the shirt and the boxers, but not before she takes a whiff of the cologne on her wrists and feels her skin new underneath something that is Steve’s.

 

 

*

It’s not like she doesn’t want to go, or even that Steve tries to hold her back. They’d worked on an AIM bust the week before, and Steve did a remarkable job at staying in his lane and leaving his caveman shit at home, even when she’d fallen off of an awning and her entire left side had turned purple, fracturing her wrist. She rewarded him with a picture of her soaking in her bathtub later, overflowing with bubbles and captioned “so how do you unwind after such a shitty day?”

They’d talked on the phone after for two hours; the water was like ice when she’d clambered out.

But the morning the rest of them leave, Bruce catches her in the hall and hands her one of the two paper cups of coffee in his trembling hands. He’s always shaking a little, a fine tremor she asked Clint about once she noticed it then couldn’t stop.

“A side-effect of Hulk possession,” he’d shrugged. They both dropped it.

“Do you have a minute?”

“I always have time for men offering me coffee,” she smiles, taking the drink.

“I didn’t drink this stuff before Clint,” Bruce hums thoughtfully. “Even when I was in grad school and working on my doctorate.”

“That sounds like a superpower to me.”

Bruce’s mouth twists wryly. “That’s what Betty said, too.”

“Clint’s birthday is coming up,” Kate says after a long minute when Bruce seems content to not speak again. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“Your friend Billy talked his way on the Quinjet for today. Natasha thinks he’s funny.”

“...Good for him?”

Bruce smiles at her kindly, coming to a stop in front of the elevator.

“I think you should sit this one out.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not going either. They won’t need us, especially with Billy on the team. He’ll probably do most of the real work, the others will just be keeping Doom’s lugs busy.”

“I’m missing the part where I shouldn’t go.”

“You should let Steve and Clint save face —”

Kate nearly spits out her coffee.

“Steve and Clint are both grown men, their relationship has nothing to do with me. And I’m nothing to be embarrassed about!” She interrupts him hotly.

“They were friends, before, but neither of them have figured out how to act around each other now that you,” Bruce makes a very vague, strange waving gesture. “They are grown men, but they are...emotionally stunted, to say the least. Let them have a few hours to remember how to be friends. Male bonding, whatever.”

“...They are both so dumb,” She says finally.

Bruce shrugs. “We knew what we were getting into.”

Kate smiles into her coffee listening to him say it so easily, thinking of Clint trying to creep into his own apartment in the blue hours of the morning, seeing him sprawled out like a fat house cat on Bruce’s scattered papers in the lab.

“Fine, but I’ll be bothering you in the lab until they get back.”

“Be my guest, I need some new organic samples anyway. What’s your blood count at usually?”

 

 

*

They don’t come back that day. Not even that week. She knows they are gone when she gets down to the basement, but no one is around to see her be weak and mopey trying to feel close to a ninety-eight year old Safety Grandpa, so she goes to the gym anyway.

 

 

*

“Do you want to be alone?”

Kate drops the fifty pound weights in her hands, hardly daring to hope.

“I really, really don’t.”

Steve has about three days worth of a beard ghosting his jaw and purple circles bagging heavily under his eyes. He doesn’t move from the door.

“The next time there is trouble in Latveria, remind me I don’t give a shit.”

“You’re a big damn hero, Steve. You won’t listen to me.”

His mouth twitches.

“You’re right. Next time I just need to have the right Hawkeye watching my back. We would have been out sooner if you were with us, Kate.”

She shrugs.

“I know. Did you and Clint have a good heart-to-heart?”

Steve stops where he is walking forward, brow creased as he works out her words.

“...I am going to find a way to hurt Bruce Banner.”

“He’s been caffeinating me in your absence and letting me try some fun drugs he’s working on. Go easy on him. Clint’s a whiner, I’m sure he was just tired of hearing about it.”

Her breath is all shallow as Steve puts his hands on her shoulders gingerly, rubs her arms like he’s never touched her before.

“I have been expecting you to run or get tired of me this whole time.”

Kate cups her hands around Steve’s face, voice sugar sweet when she speaks.

“My mom would be so proud of me for picking such an oblivious idiot. You’re such a _catch_ , Steve Rogers.”

His eyes flutter closed under her touch. She likes that.

“Not every putz gets a beautiful, smart sharpshooter to keep them in line.”

“Do you have one of those?” She murmurs. There is pleasure unfurling in her belly, writhing heat low into her groin and stroking up the line of her spine as Steve wraps his arms around her waist.

“I’m working on it. If she’s smart maybe she’ll turn me down, though,” he grins, sharp and genuine.

“Do you want some unsolicited advice, Stevie? This amazing, beautiful, loyal, smart, incredible sharpshooter probably needs to be shown how much you appreciate her. Like a lot.”

Steve is laughing when he kisses her, but so is she. He lifts her up and presses her back against the mirror while she wraps her legs around his waist. His stubble is a delicious drag down her neck, and she arches into the gentle burn with a happy, fluttery sigh before he scrapes his teeth on the tendon there and nips at her jugular.

“Put me down,” she breathes. He’s nearly dropped her and is backing away before she’s even finished saying it, hands up placatingly.

“I’m sorry, I just —”

“Don’t you dare,” she growls. “Get back here, you big dumb oaf.”

“Oaf,” he repeats, wounded.

Kate rolls her eyes as she steps forward, yanking his shirt off as soon as he’s in arm’s reach.

 _Oh_.

“Thank you God, sweet baby Jesus, and Dr. Erskine,” she whimpers, running her hands on the swells and ridges of his chest, his stomach, his shoulders. Her mouth follows, licking down the line of his clavicle, trailing down to catch a nipple between her teeth.

Steve paws her shirt off with no finesse, and Kate is going to rag on him for it later — later. She helps him get it off and feels her brain short circuit like a tripped plug when he falls to his knees in front of her, kissing up her navel, through the stretchy cotton of her sports bra before peeling that off, too.

“Will you lie down for me?” He says roughly, like there is anything but one answer to that question in this context.

Kate falls down half on her discarded weight (her ass is bruised for five days after, Steve doesn’t let her forget it) and is shucking her pants and underwear off before Steve can even say anything.

“Take your pants off, Rogers, or I will develop laser eyes and burn them off.”

“No.”

Kate can’t even say anything snappy back; he starts trailing wet, open mouthed kisses up from the inside of her knee and his pants are somehow, miraculously, the last thing on her mind.

Steve sucks at the junction of thin skin where her thigh creases to its apex. He starts to kiss back down towards her knee.

 _Asshole_.  
  
Kate squirms and keens and feels him smile against her skin before he busies himself at the wet line of her cunt without any more preamble. She arches up off the mats at the feel of the flat of his tongue, the bristle of his stubble. He winds her up until she’s mewling before she feels two of his thick fingers easing into her. Kate’s vision spots black around the edges.

He curls them when he finds that ridgy, spongy place that makes her insides all water and strokes at it relentlessly until she comes with a sob she will deny to her grave.

His red, swollen mouth is all wet slickness when he pulls back, panting.

“You beautiful moron, you incredible oaf, I think I’ll keep you,” she wheezes.

Kate has to make two attempts to rise, crawling over to unzip Steve’s jeans and pull them off, nuzzling at the coarse hair low on his belly.

“Later,” he says gruffly when she mouths at the wet smear tenting his boxers. “Properly.”

“Oh you get _proper_ oral —” She says tersely, freeing him from his boxers fully.

Steve has her flat on her back before she finishes the thought, sucking at the hollow of her throat, the rise of her breast, fingers back to stroking at her tender, wet entrance before he guides himself into her. Kate scrunches her eyes closed to hide how she goes cross eyed feeling each slow, perfect inch, buries her face into Steve’s skin and laps at the salt there.

He is still when they’re pressed fully together, and Kate wraps her legs around his waist and nudges him with her heel when she’s accustomed to the stretch.

Steve tries to be slow and careful, she can feel his restraint heavy on top of her. There’s a time and a place for that, she wants to explore it fully when they aren’t splayed out in a public gym. She pulls the shell of his ear between her teeth and grinds her hips up.

Kate breaks him in easy.

“Steve, _fuck_ , you feel good.”

His rhythm stutters and he inhales sharply near her ear.

“I’ve thought about this for so long.” Kate weasels a hand between them and starts making little circles on her clit. He bats her hand away when he realizes what she’s doing and starts rubbing at the nub there himself. She rewards him by raking her nails down his back; he arches under it like a cat. “I still have your boxers, yeah? I wear them when I think about it. I imagine you’re the one that’s touching me like this when I do it myself.”

His name is a keening sigh off her tongue when he picks up the pace, and the words keep coming because they are true and Steve is swearing audibly and nonsensically above her — he moans her name, a sound she won’t be forgetting — and Kate _loves_ it.

“I think you walk in on me in your bed, in your clothes, and you watch me at first. I come once on my own then you make me keep them on while you fuck me, just like this.”

“ _Kate_ , have _mercy_ , please —”

“I wear them back home, and then I send you pictures.” Her release is budding tight and sweet under his relentless rhythm, she keeps babbling because that’s what she does. “And then I — _I_ —”

Steve comes with a gasp that sounds very soft from a man so big, and she follows after with a little cry. She jolts a bit when Steve rolls off of her, wincing. Ouch.

“Are you alright?” He asks thickly. His eyes are all swallowed black.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that.”

It’s absurd, sprawled out in the gym like they are, but Kate rolls on her side and tucks herself under his chin, peppers kisses and traces nonsense on Steve’s sweaty, heaving chest like they're in bed.

“You’re pouting,” she says after a minute.

“I am not.”

Kate looks up at him, unimpressed.

“I just had this planned...better.”

She shoots up, indignant and ignoring the subsequent lightheadedness. Steve’s face drains of color and he grabs her arm as she moves to stand.

“Well I’m so _sorry_ this wasn’t good enough for you, _asshole_ —”

“ _No_ , no. Not like that. I meant for...you? I wanted to bring you back to my place and take our time and…” Steve frowns, looking at their clothes strewn across the room. Kate can see some lightbulb flicker to life over his head, plastered with his mussed, sweaty hair. “And use the condoms I made sure to buy....” he trails off, brow creased. “Shit.”

Kate purses her lips and blows her cheeks out but can’t stop herself from breaking down into the giggles.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

Steve falls back on the mat with a thump. “Nevermind.”

Kate leans forward, kisses his swollen mouth. “Pouting. Right there.”

He says nothing as she curls back up into his chest, humming. “I came twice and I wasn’t even on top, quit beating yourself up. We can go to your place and use all the condoms you want, Grandpa Safety.”

“I’m going to regret saying that the rest of my life.”

Kate kisses his shoulder and allows herself a few minutes more of closeness before rising with a stretch.

“Come on, Stevie. Let’s erase the security footage before Tony can use it for blackmail and go home.”

She slips her pants back on and tosses him his shirt, smiling.

“Unless you want to be alone?”

**Author's Note:**

> A million, trillion thanks to Xan, who betad for this fic and fandom he doesn't even go to. I love you!! He made this fic so much better. <3 
> 
> I finished the first draft of my novel and i wanted to celebrate writng a fluffy piece of porn. Somehow 13k words later they're in love and shit. Whaaat.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading! Feedback is appreciated more than I could ever say. <3


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